Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
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Home > Organum > organum_080910 Wednesday, 10 September 2008 OrganumThe authoritarian anecdote. I can't trust the anecdotal theatre. The anecdote presumes upon the validity of the consciousness from which it emerges – the anecdote is valid, on this score, only to the extent of the trustworthiness of the person telling it. But he always has his own agenda to pursue. It is true only insofar as it convinces the listener, who may or may not be willing to enter into that consciousness; if the ground of its telling is open to question, or subverted, suddenly the anecdote's power dissipates. It is a confidence game; the anecdotalist attempts to win my confidence; he tries to take me within his own; and if he does, I lose, sap that I've proven myself to be. Most dramatic plots are collections of anecdotes: first this happens, then this, then this (each "this" an anecdote, chained together into what the undergraduate playwriting textbooks call a "narrative arc"). What interests me are the interstices between the anecdotes, how one leads to the other; though I like a good anecdote myself, there's more to theatre than that. (Bars are very good places for anecdotes, but I go to the theatre for other reasons.) It is only in these interstices that my imagination has play, that the play allows me, as an audience member, to become creative myself. The anecdotist who doesn't allow me to imagine, who directs me down one specific narrative avenue without deviation, filling in those spaces, becomes a tyrant over my imagination. An illusionist, not a magician. In his easy intimacy, in his personableness itself, he draws me in to subsume me. The erotic aphorist, on the other hand, confronts me with
the contradictions inherent within my preconceptions in an attempt to
overturn them, to find a new conceptual possibility. Confidence is not
even an issue; confidence is irrelevant. The surprise of aphorism is in
its contradiction of established wisdom, including my own. An aphorism
proves itself, it doesn't prove the validity of a worldview. In
confronting and challenging me so, the theatre artist frees my eyes to
wander over his play: they can roam at liberty, having had the ground
shaken (and respectfully so) beneath them, and perhaps find a new
unexpected object or person on his stage to caress ... So my attention
wanders, freely and most creatively, in his theatre. I am not rapt by his
creation; I create myself, in all senses of those words, in both the
transitive and intransitive forms of the verb. And I am not trapped by the
anecdotist's need to be respected and well- The theatre artist might give others the courage to become erotic aphorists themselves, in their own lives, and give themselves up to the possibilities for renewed life within their reawakened imaginations. There are worse things to be. Posted in /Organum |